The End of All Our Exploring: Stories

By F. Brett Cox

The stories in F. Brett Cox's debut collection move through multiple genres and many times and places, from the monsters of the 19th century to the future fields of war, from New England to the South to the American West, from the strange house at the top of the hill to the bottom of your childhood swimming pool. But whatever the time and place, and whether utterly fantastic or all too real, all of these remarkable fictions pose the fundamental question: what's next?  The End of All Our Exploring features 27 stories, and it also includes Cox's unique historical notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fairwood Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781393262985

F. Brett Cox

F. Brett Cox is the author of many powerful works of literary fiction. A Southerner by birth, he currently lives in Vermont.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

by Andy Duncan

What a pleasure to hold in my hands a fiction collection by F. Brett Cox! Reading it, even scanning the contents, is for me like visiting a family album. Brett is a brother of mine, in the sense of the families we choose for ourselves.

Brett and I have been friends for almost a quarter-century, and would have met a decade earlier, when we both were students at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, had our aim been better. I was a journalism undergraduate, not an English graduate student like Brett, but I went to a number of author readings and other English-department events, and he and I were in the same room at the same time more than once, but just missed one another. Clearly the world was not ready.

In our timeline and, I trust, yours, Brett and I finally met at one of John Kessel’s parties in Raleigh, North Carolina, circa 1994. I was one of John’s master’s students at North Carolina State, while Brett was a Ph.D. student at Duke. But our first extended conversation took place in January 1995 at a regional science fiction convention, Chattacon in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Most of the attendees were there for gaming, or for media fandom, but four or five of us dutifully trooped from one author reading to another, and bonded pretty well by weekend’s end. (Another in that group was Christopher Rowe, whose own splendid collection, Telling the Map, came out in 2017.)

Brett and I quickly realized that though we grew up about 180 miles apart, me in rural South Carolina and him up north in rural North Carolina, we had basically the same upbringings, the same extended, fitfully genteel families (in the sense of blood kin and married-in kin) and the family secrets to go with them, the same pushmi-pullyu relationship to the American South, and certainly the same obsessive, all-encompassing reading habits; as a result, we both were determined not to turn out like Quentin Compson. (So far, so good!) In conversation, we frequently tell one another, We are the same, a sentence we usually deploy as a transition device, where others might say, I can top that one.

But Brett discovered science fiction fandom at a much younger age than I did. As a teenager, he briefly corresponded with Richard Shaver, a thought that has kept me awake nights. Brett’s collection of first-edition UFO books inspires awe, and wherever he lives, he erects monumental towers of science fiction paperbacks and digest magazines that tease the visitor out of thought, like the moai of Rapa Nui. Sometimes (I can attest) these topple onto visitors as they sleep, and enrich their dreams.

Unsurprisingly, we have spent countless hours together at science fiction conventions, and we have shared many mild adventures on that circuit, for example our brief encounter in a hotel bar with a morose Scottish Highlander, dressed as for battle, who responded to our cheery greeting by snarling, Don’t touch me sword. Our panicked retreat can be imagined. At the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held each March in Florida —Y’all come!—Brett and I often wind up as co-stars onstage, I suppose because we’ve had so much opportunity through the years to perfect our timing, like the Sunshine Boys. We’ve played astronauts in zero-g; we’ve played fawning minions at the feet of Brian W. Aldiss (typecasting); we’ve played Frankenstein’s creature and a rampaging villager (further typecasting).

But enjoyable as all that has been, I value more all the time we’ve spent together not wearing name tags: visiting the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio; rescuing a snapping turtle in Georgia; attending a production of Julius Caesar at London’s Globe Theatre; having dinner with Fannie Flagg. (I’m unclear how that last one happened.) We’ve prowled through a number of cemeteries, for example the stonemasons’ graveyard in Barre, Vermont. We both married well, better than we deserve; Sydney and I were present for Brett’s wedding to Jeanne Beckwith, and we have spent a lot of time with that brilliant, lovely couple since, though never as much as we’d like. Sydney and Jeanne are good at getting Brett and me to talk about something other than, say, the 19th-century rat trap that Tom Waits demonstrated (sans rat) to David Letterman, which for Brett and me was a sort of apex of television.

A longtime member of the Cambridge Science Fiction Writers Workshop, and a tireless supporter of other writers’ work, Brett has helped a lot of colleagues improve their manuscripts. I’m one of them. For example, during a conversation in the car, I believe en route to Moonrise Kingdom at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier, Brett suggested the crucial plot twist of my novelette New Frontiers of the Mind. My favorite example of Brett’s story-doctor skills came at ICFA one year, after John Kessel read aloud a chunk of his Mary Shelley-Jane Austen mash-up then in progress. John confessed, I have no idea what to title this thing. In the audience, Brett calmly raised his hand and said, Pride and Prometheus—and that is, indeed, the title engraved on the base of John’s second Nebula Award.

Looking over this remarkable assemblage of stories, however, I cannot recall being a damn bit of use to the drafting of any of them. I was sort of present at the dawn of Road Dead, as I remember exulting long distance with Brett, right after he moved to rural Vermont, at his discovery that the town’s only decent cell-phone reception was in a hilltop cemetery. But the funny, terrifying, fully inhabited and immersive story that resulted, which takes up barely three pages in this volume, was all Brett.

This whole book, in fact, is all Brett: his fascination with the sucking undertow of history, his determination to defy the sanitized, Convention and Visitors Bureau view of community, his keen sense of the grotesque in daily routines and everyday people. Consider, for example, the story that accompanies the matter-of-fact title Maria Works at Ocean City Nails, in which nothing fantastic happens, other than everything. One gets the sense that for Brett—should I use his last name, now that I’m in literary-critic mode? Nah—the whole United States is a Gothic construction, and the overhead vaults are beginning to crumble.

As I re-read these, I think of course of Shirley Jackson (whose memory Brett has done much to sustain, as a co-founder of the Shirley Jackson Awards) and of Flannery O’Connor (who shows up as a character in this volume, along with Herman Melville, Geronimo, Madeline Usher and multiple Bette Pages), but also of the late Irish writer Frank O’Connor, who kept throwing his cap over the wall of his childhood and jumping after it, no matter what he found on the other side.

You will meet some of my favorite fictional characters here, including the young air-raid warden in Suspension, the angry villain who vents, Sam Hall-like, throughout The Last Testament of Major Ludlam, and, well, just about everyone in The Light of the Ideal and The Amnesia Helmet, both of which should have been awards contenders, both of which were published by zines that folded moments thereafter, in time-honored fashion.

For that matter, Madeline’s Version was written for Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, an anthology co-edited by Brett and me, commissioned by a publisher that folded before the book came out. Tor came to the rescue, somehow persuaded by agent Shawna McCarthy, but it was a near thing. Short-fiction publishing can be precarious, like America. (Heads up! Another chunk of the vault just fell.) Still, we’re very proud of Crossroads, which was animated from the start by Brett’s determination to include genre authors and mainstream authors, the traditional and the experimental, science fiction and fantasy and horror and magic realism—all broadly defined, or not so much defined as half-remembered, like a joyous evening among friends. Brett does not believe that good fences make good neighbors; he loves genre fiction too much to isolate it.

The same eclecticism animates this volume. Sure, you will find zombies, UFOs, sea serpents and so forth, but they are seldom deployed in the way you expect. A Brett Cox character is likely to respond to an intrusion of the marvelous, the supernatural, the horrific by walking away and trying to forget about it, which of course is just the way we handle them in daily life.

In format, too, these stories would be all over the map, if there were a map. Some of them may be poems; a couple are definitely songs. At least one is a stage monologue, but several others are performance pieces: I’ve heard Brett perform them, though the convention program promised only a reading.

I can’t help wondering, with happy anticipation, what the fantastic Mr. Cox—no, sorry, Dr. Cox—no, sorry, Colonel Cox, Vermont State Militia (you’ll have to ask him about that)—will come up with next. The title notwithstanding, I’m sure these are not the end of all his exploring.

In the meantime, enjoy these stories—and watch your step!

Andy Duncan signature

Andy Duncan

Frostburg, Maryland

May 2018

LEGACY

He brought her flowers every day. There was a patch halfway between his house and hers that belonged to no one he knew of, and there was always something there. Nice ones in the spring—daffodils and jonquils, magnolia blossoms from the lone tree near the edge of the road. But even in the cold months there were small blossoms to be had, and he always stopped and picked some of whatever was there. It was the least he could do. If things continued as they were, it was all he could do.

She met him at the door and took his gift for the thousandth time with the appearance of as much gratitude as she had the first time. He did not know after so long if appearance and reality were the same. He supposed it really didn’t matter.

He carefully removed his hat as he crossed the threshold of her home. Rather than waiting for his hostess to take it, he hung it himself on the dark maple coat rack that stood by the door. She allowed him that familiarity. He followed her into the parlor and paused as she placed the flowers in a waiting vase on a table beneath a picture of her grandparents—not the ones who were the source of all the troubles, but her mother’s parents. They stared rigidly from the wall, the man’s forehead just to the edge of baldness beneath his white hair and above his crooked tie, the woman’s mouth drooping at the corners, the left side of her head obscured by a diagonal white cloth. Two years after he first started calling on her, she had told him that the cloth was there to hide a tumor that her grandmother never had removed. God had placed that mark on her, her grandmother said, and no man was going to cut it away.

They’re lovely, Franklin, she said. You shouldn’t trouble yourself so.

It’s my pleasure, Constance, he replied. Always.

They sat side by side on the divan and talked pleasantly, neutrally before going in to the supper she had prepared. Her students were undergoing their first encounter with a complete play of Shakespeare; one of the girls, her favorite of the term, had asked if Juliet wasn’t going to get a beating from her father for being so disobedient. The demand for auto supplies was increasing so much Franklin had determined to double his orders for the month and set up a display in the store. There was talk of war in the papers, but President Wilson promised not to shed American blood over European complaints, and the state house in Montgomery seemed more concerned with how, or if, to pay for flood control along the Tombigbee river. Her hands rested comfortably in her lap and her skirt brushed the floor. Franklin had seen pictures in the catalogs that came into the store of newer fashions, skirts that hung only to the tops of the ladies’ high-button shoes, but Constance had not changed yet. He sometimes dreamed of her ankles.

After a decent interval, they went into the dining room, where he sat at one corner of the dining table. The table was absurdly long. Her parents had been known for their dinner parties, but after their passing Constance had not kept up the tradition. She served the meal—green salad with fresh garden tomatoes, cream of spinach soup, pork chops with gravy, new potatoes and sweet corn, peach cobbler for dessert—and then sat across from him. She did not have a maid, although with what her parents had left her, she could easily have afforded one. She did not really need to earn a living teaching. But she preferred to do these things. They ate heartily. Constance was a wonderful cook.

You’ve outdone yourself, he said. A man couldn’t ask for a better meal.

Thank you, she said. Here, have some more potatoes.

After dinner he helped her clear the table and stack the dishes in the kitchen sink. He always offered to wash them, and she always declined. She was so precise about some things, less so about others—in sharp contrast to his own mother, she had no objection to letting the dishes wait until bedtime, or even until the next day. It was one of many things he loved about her.

They returned to the parlor. He reclaimed his spot on the divan, and she sat at the piano and played for him. Some of the old songs—Flow Gently, Sweet Afton, with the perfect air of melancholy that had brought tears to the eyes of the old men and women at the Burns Society fundraiser last winter. Some of the new songs—she had just acquired the music for the latest from Mr. Berlin, and she played it with total, uncalculated delight. He tapped time gently with his foot and felt himself smiling. When the sun finally set, he turned up the lamps and she sat back down beside him. It was March and the days were getting longer.

At this point it was all right to take her hand, to hold it and relax into the divan and look into her eyes, so deeply blue in the day, turned slightly green in the lamplight. She laid her head carefully on his shoulder and stroked the top of his hand with her own.

I could stay like this forever, she said.

You can.

No, we have to work tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after that.

You can stay with me forever. I can stay with you. I don’t have to leave. If you’ll just—

Franklin, she said. It was a self-contained statement, not a prelude to anything. In the early days of their courtship, five years gone, even a hint of the topic would cause her to stiffen and pull away. Now, after such a long time, she offered no resistance. And no acquiescence.

We could be married, he said. It was the first time he had uttered the word in months.

No. You know we can’t.

Surely if nothing has happened by now—

Franklin. She sat up straight beside him, rose from the divan, walked over to the piano, and rested her hand near the picture on top. Her great-grandparents on her father’s side. The source of all the troubles. An old man and woman, plainly dressed, surrounded by two younger couples and a young woman, Constance’s grandmother Alice, centered in the frame, looking neutrally at something far beyond the photographer. She stared at the faded portrait in silence.

Franklin waited for her to speak, but knew there was nothing to say that had not already been said a thousand times before. Great-grandfather Henson. Peg Donovan. A dispute over slaves. The old woman’s lawsuit. Her rage at the verdict. The disturbances that followed: I am Peg Donovan’s witch, and Ethan Henson shall know no peace. The inexplicable torment of the grandmother: pins stuck in flesh, hair pulled out by the roots, obscene voices in the empty air. The family become a public spectacle for four years until the great-grandfather finally died and the grandmother’s engagement to Franklin’s grandfather was broken off. I am Peg Donovan’s witch, and they shall never marry. Only then had the sticking and pulling and voices stopped. Years later a New York paper said the grandmother was a liar, a ventriloquist, a fraud like those Fox girls up north. She had sued the paper for libel, and won. Sometimes Franklin thought that, more than anything, was what kept Constance convinced.

And we shall throw away our own happiness, Franklin said, the bitterness he thought was past creeping back into his voice. The sins of the grandparents shall be visited upon the grandchildren?

Apparently so, she said, still staring at the picture. You know what our families have been through since then.

All families have misfortunes, he said. Everyone dies sooner or later. It’s not preordained. It’s not a curse.

We can’t take that chance, Constance said, and then, more softly, I can’t.

He wanted to say: It didn’t want your grandfather to marry my grandmother, and what has that to do with us? It said it would come back, but it said it was an Indian, then a Spanish monk, then the ghost of another of Henson’s dupes. Why should we believe it now? Peg Donovan was said to be in league with the devil, but Peg Donovan is dead. You will be thirty this year.

But all he said was, again, We could be married.

No.

It’s the twentieth century. We are adults who can read and write. I can speak into that box hanging in the hallway and be heard a hundred miles away. In a few years, you’ll probably even be able to vote. We have no room for witches and spells and curses.

There is still plenty of room for death and suffering, Constance said. Look at Europe. Read the newspaper.

And you are more afraid of a supposed curse than modern warfare? Our witch is more powerful than artillery shells and mustard gas?

Slaves, she said, as if he had said nothing.

Constance—

I wish we had left Africa alone, she said. I wish we had never heard of Africa.

He looked down at his empty hands. There was no use continuing. All right, Constance. All right. Come and sit back down with me.

She did, and they talked of other things. The lights shone through the scrolled globes of the lamps and cast familiar patterns on the wall. When they heard the grandfather clock in the living room strike nine, he stood automatically and she walked him to the door.

He kissed her in the open doorway before she turned on the porch light. She tasted of peach cobbler and her own skin. He looked at her until he was satisfied she was not angry or upset with him, and then he went home.

As he walked the half mile back to his own house, New Orleans came to him unbidden, as it sometimes did. Once, before his courtship of Constance had begun, when he was first taking the reins of his business, he went to New Orleans on a buying trip. He was a good man and had tried to be what his father had always called a True Gentleman. His father had warned him about the sins of the flesh, warned him how such activity was not only disreputable but debilitating, draining a man of much-needed vital energy. After Franklin had attained his majority, his father had even confided that he had marital relations with Franklin’s mother no more than once a month for that very reason.

But New Orleans—its deep exotic layers, its sights and smells and very texture—was like nothing Franklin had ever experienced. One night at dinner in the French Quarter with some other young businessmen, he let himself get drunk, which hardly ever happened, and the others swore they could go over to Storyville and get whatever women they wanted, and it was perfectly legal. His mind told him it was wrong; his body and spirit followed the others over to Basin Street and a large house with a red lamp by the door.

He found himself in a cluttered but clean room with a woman whose auburn hair fell to her waist. She sat patiently in an overstuffed chair and crossed her black-stockinged legs so that her robe fell back from them. There were small signs on the wall with odd phrases: Oh! Dearie, I give U much pleasure; Dearie, U ask for Marguerite. An embroidered pillow balanced on the back of the chair announced, Daisies won’t tell. From beneath the floor came the muffled clatter of a piano playing a song he had never heard before. He stood swaying in front of the woman as she opened her robe. She wore nothing underneath. He fell on top of her; she pushed him off, made him take off his pants, and guided him to the bed. She lay on her back and stroked her own nipples and said things he barely understood. He fell on top of her again. It was over too quickly and he wanted to stay, but he didn’t have enough money. On his way out he noticed for the first time the pictures on the wall of men and women doing what he had just finished doing, and on the vanity by the overstuffed chair, a lone photograph of a little girl feeding ducks by a pond.

In the corridor he passed by one of the other young businessmen, who clapped him on the shoulder, gave him a wink, and walked on.

He burned with shame at such thoughts, especially after spending the evening with Constance. And he was not always so preoccupied after his visits. But he sometimes was. Of late, more often than not. He had to remind himself of what he truly loved in Constance, what the Storyville whore could not possibly have. The whore could not cook. The whore could not play the piano. The whore could not recite Shakespeare from memory. The sun did not rise and set in the whore’s blue eyes.

By the time he reached his bedroom he was filled to bursting with his love for Constance and his memories of Basin Street. He took care of the matter, bathed, and went to sleep. He dreamed of marrying Constance and taking her to New Orleans for their honeymoon.

He did not see Constance for several nights after that. There was nothing unusual about it; as close as they were, it would have been an imposition to spend every evening with her. He did go by her house and leave her flowers every day. His father, who approved of both Constance and her family’s money, had learned not to question him too closely. Instead, when the new and larger order of auto parts came in, he complimented Franklin on the resulting storefront display.

And then one day she called him at the store and asked him to come over that night. There was something wrong in her voice, but she refused to elaborate. He said of course he would.

She met him at the door but immediately turned and went into the parlor and sat down, ignoring the flowers in his hand. She had never done that before; he had no points of reference for such behavior. After a moment, he hung his hat and laid the flowers carefully on the table by the vase which still held yesterday’s assortment. She sat on the divan with her hands clenched tightly together. He stood mute, uncertain what to do.

Do you know Aaron Huckabee? she asked.

Jake Huckabee’s brother? He has a farm over near Andalusia.

Yes.

He’s two months behind on his account at the store.

She looked at him the way his mother used to if he ate his salad with the wrong fork. His daughter Ruthann is one of my tenth-graders.

Yes.

She was not at school today. Or rather she was there long enough to leave a sealed note on my desk. Constance rose, went to the table with the flowers, took a piece of paper out of a drawer, and sat back down on the divan.

Dear Miss Baldwin, she read. I am so sorry but I will not be in class ever again. My daddy has gone too far this time and I cannot stay any longer. I am sorry not to tell you face to face but I tried once or twice and I just couldn’t. He has beat me more and more and done other things too. It hurts all the time and I can’t look in a mirror I hate so what I see. Please don’t be mad. I have learned a lot from you. My mother has people down in Mobile and I will go to them. Please don’t tell my father. I love you Miss Baldwin you have been very good to me. Please don’t tell. Love Ruthann.

She set the letter on the end table and held her head in her hands.

He sat by her and put his arm around her, removed it, put it back. Constance. I am so very sorry this happened.

She tried to tell me and couldn’t? Or was I just not listening?

The Huckabees are a bad lot, Franklin said. Aaron’s mother’s family was the worst sort of trash, always fighting and cutting. My mother said when she was a child they could hear them clear across the creek. I’m not surprised this happened.

She had bruises sometimes, Constance said. I didn’t think anything of it. She lived out on a farm. They all had hard labor to do.

This is not your fault.

Ruthann had a strange tone in her voice when she was asking about Romeo and Juliet. I realize that now. I should have realized that then.

This is not your fault. He tightened his arm around her and she leaned into him.

Other things, Franklin? What sort of man could do that?

His head suddenly filled with the room in Storyville and the photograph of the little girl on the vanity. He shuddered and held Constance even tighter. Don’t think of it, he whispered. Don’t think of such things. Her people in Mobile will see after her.

And who will I see after? She pulled away and walked quickly over to the piano. She stared at the photograph on top. And who will see after me?

I will.

I have been so careful. So very careful. I have preserved myself, preserved us. I wanted to make a difference with the children. She lowered her head. I wanted you to be proud of me.

Oh, Constance, I am. He rose and went to her. He wanted to embrace her fully but simply touched her cheek. I am so very proud. No man could ask for a better woman. You are everything I’ve ever wanted.

It doesn’t matter, does it?

It doesn’t matter that I love you?

It doesn’t matter how careful we are. Terrible things happen for no reason. We can take all the precautions in the world. We can never leave our own back yard, and a tree will fall. We can confine ourselves to one room, and the lamps will turn over and burn us.

He had never heard her talk like this. It frightened him and made him hold her closer.

Constance—

We can’t do anything to stop it, she said.

He turned her face to his and kissed her mouth. In the light from the window her blue eyes seemed nearly back. She kissed him back, wrapped her arms around him. He buried his face in her neck and almost fainted from the pressure and the scent and the warmth.

They returned to the divan and remained for a very long time. Then, without speaking, he rose and took her hand, and they walked side by side into her bedroom.

He had not known she kept a picture of him on her vanity. She took down her hair; it fell almost to her waist. At her request he helped her with the back of her dress, but when he tried to push it off her shoulders she gently stopped him and disrobed herself. The dress rustled noisily to the floor. He helped her again with her corset. To his astonishment, his hands were steady. She stepped away from him and removed her undergarments. She stood with her arms over her breasts; her face looked like her grandmother in the picture on the piano. He took her arms and pulled them gently toward him, kissed her hands, placed them on her breasts, and moved them in slow circles. She lay back on the bed and waited for him to undress. Her hands moved over her breasts, around and around. He came to her as gently as he had kissed her hands. She cried out in pain, once, and he thought his heart would stop, but she wrapped herself more tightly around him and it lasted a